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Wednesday, September 27, 2006

After all-pro Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Terrell Owens’ reported suicide attempt Tuesday night, don’t be surprised if we hear of a diagnosis of bipolar disorder (aka manic-depression) in his case. Owens has long been known to be a maniac; indeed, he has gotten much more press over the years for his obsessively attention-seeking acting out than he has for his spectacular receptions and runs after catches. Some lowlights follow; many more have been catalogued by James Alder, and some videos that would embarrass a sensible person may even be seen at Owens’ own official Web site.

There was the time in 2000, in a game in Dallas when Owens played for the San Francisco 49ers, when after scoring a touchdown, he ran to the middle of the field, to dramatically place the football, in order to insult and humiliate the Cowboys’ players and fans (and embarrass his own team). And then he scored again, and repeated his performance.

In 2002, there was the notorious “Sharpie” incident, when Owens tucked a Sharpies pen into his sock, which he whipped out in the end zone upon scoring a touchdown to sign the ball, which he then handed to his financial advisor, who by the way, was “sitting in an end zone luxury suite rented by Shawn Springs, the cornerback he had just beaten on the scoring play.”

In November 2004, ABC used Monday Night Football to plug its steamy Sunday night show, Desperate Housewives, by airing a spot just before the game in which gorgeous blonde Desperate Housewives co-star Nicolette Sheridan, appeared in the Philadelphia Eagles’ locker room, wearing only a towel, and seduced Owens, who was wearing his Philadelphia Eagles uniform. The spot ended with Sheridan doffing her towel and jumping into the arms of Owens, who said that the team would just have to do without him.

After the spot caused outrage among viewers, and unhappiness on Owens’ team, ABChalfheartedly apologized for it two days later, but the apology, like the stunt, cost it nothing, and the network had gotten the buzz it sought.

The spot also had a definite racial subtext. As Owens is black and Sheridan is white, the spot was meant to scandalize whites, who were not permitted to complain about it – at least not in racial, as opposed to sexual terms.

When the brilliant white nationalist political thinker Sam Francis (1947-2005) did complain, leftwing media mercenary and admitted journalism fraud David Brock initiated a campaign seeking to cause Francis to lose almost all of the outlets carrying his column. Conversely, a couple of years earlier, when half-black actress Halle Berry performed sex scenes in movies with white actors, blacks across the country expressed open racial outrage, without suffering any negative consequences.

(Following the teachings of my hopelessly romantic mom, I am a longtime practitioner and supporter of integration, but I respect interracial unions based on bonds of affection, rather than mere prostitution or the attempt to offend some people for offense’s sake. And if one is going to respect the belligerently anti-integrationist racial sensibilities of the vast majority of blacks, one must respect similar sensibilities among many whites.)

Notwithstanding Owens’ heroic performance, playing on a badly injured ankle and leg in a losing struggle in the 2005 Super Bowl, he has often put his ego before NFL rules, and even before the good of his team of the moment.

In 2001, after Owens' screw-up caused his team, the 49ers, to lose to the Chicago Bears, Owens criticized his coach, Steve Mariucci.

In 2004, Owens sought free agency, but his agent missed the free agency deadline, yet Owens insisted that the rules be waived in his case, and that he be permitted to sign with the Philadelphia Eagles. NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue indulged him.

As James Alder wrote, “Because they retained his rights, the 49ers then traded him to the Baltimore Ravens, but Owens refused to report to his new team. He expressed his desire to play in Philadelphia, and filed a grievance, claiming he should be granted free agency. After a series of negotiations, a deal was worked out between the three teams which sent Owens to Philadelphia where he signed a seven-year, $49 million deal against the advice of the players’ union.”

Prior to the 2005 season – i.e., after only one season in Philadelphia – Owens demanded that the Eagles renegotiate his contract and increase his $7.5 million salary. During summer training camp that year, Owens engaged in bizarre behavior, refusing to speak to teammates or the media. But when he was suspended for one week by head coach Andy Reid, Owens, while purportedly snubbing reporters, did “crunches” in front of his house before an audience of reporters and cameramen.

Halfway through that season, Owens publicly insulted his team’s Pro Bowl/Super Bowl quarterback, Donovan McNabb, saying that the team would have been more successful with Green Bay Packer quarterback Brett Favre. There was a racial subtext to the insult, because Favre is white and McNabb (like Owens) is black, a subtext that McNabb made explicit, when he complained about Owens comparing him unfavorably to a white, as opposed to a black quarterback. (Note too that while McNabb was then in his prime, the once-dominant Favre was over the hill.)

Owens was ordered by Coach Reid to publicly apologize, both to the team and to McNabb; Owens apologized only to the team. Reid responded by again suspending Owens, initially for one week, then for four weeks, which effectively was for the balance of the season, since Reid then announced that Owens would no longer play for the Eagles.

Owens’ history of bizarre, narcissistic, and disruptive behavior also includes throwing numerous tantrums on the sidelines during games, which in the pre-Owens NFL were grounds for permanent benching.

While psychiatry cannot credibly excuse Terrell Owens’ character defects, the reported suicide attempt places his manic behavior in a new light. Thus, the possibility obtains that Owens’ doctors may suggest to him that he try out a regime of lithium, the standard treatment for leveling out bipolar disorder’s violent yins and yangs.

I have a talented but irresponsible cousin whom I’ll call “Geoffrey,” who got committed to psycho wards for nervous breakdowns over forty times in about twenty years (between the time he was roughly 15 and 35). Then he was put on lithium, and managed to remain a free man for a few years. Since I haven’t heard from or about Geoffrey in twenty years, I don’t know if he continued taking his meds – or staying off the marijuana he so loved – or if they continued helping him, but he was reasonably sane for a while.

Then there was the time during the last summer I spent on Martha’s Vineyard, in 1986, that I saw Geoffrey sitting in an Edgartown saloon called “The Café” (pronounced kayf), over a plate of nachos and melted cheese. I sat down at the table with him, and he looked up at me and asked, “Do I know you?”

This was just nine months after we had spent a day hanging out together in New York. I still don’t know if Geoffrey was spaced out on the lithium or the pot.

If I hear of Terrell Owens getting put on lithium, and then one day, in a state of honest bafflement, looking at his head coach and asking him, “Do I know you?,” I guess I’ll have my answer.

New Orleans Times-Picayune reporters Brian Thevenot, Gordon Russell, Jeff Duncan and Gwen Filosa; managing editors, news, Peter Kovacs and Dan Shea; and editor Jim Amoss, are the newest winners of the Duranty-Blair Award for Journalistic Infamy, for their September 26, 2005 attempt to “untell” the story of the savage violence that befell New Orleans just before and after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29 of last year.

In Part I, I showed some of the discrepancies between Times-Picayune reporter Brian Thevenot’s September 6, 2005 (hereafter 9/6) story depicting mayhem and murder in the New Orleans Convention Center, in the days after Katrina made landfall; the September 26, 2005 (hereafter 9/26) story that Thevenot co-authored with colleagues Gordon Russell, Jeff Duncan, and Gwen Filosa, and which claimed there had been no violence at the Convention Center or elsewhere in New Orleans; and Thevenot’s ever-changing stories through two long American Journalism Review articles and one imperious e-mail he sent to blogger Eric Scheie at Classical Values.

* * *

In 1981, Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke won a Pulitzer Prize for a story called “Jimmy’s World,” that she had fabricated out of thin air about a non-existent eight-year-old heroin addict in Washington, DC. Eventually, Cooke was caught lying about her education, which raised doubts about her credibility as a reporter. Her bosses at the Washington Post forced her to confess to the hoax, and she resigned from the newspaper, which returned its ill-gotten Pulitzer.

In 2006, conversely, the New Orleans Times-Picayune won a Pulitzer Prize for “9/26,” in which reporters Brian Thevenot, Gordon Russell, Jeff Duncan and Gwen Filosa took the very real, already reported story of New Orleans mayhem in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and “disappeared” it, replacing it with a cover story in which there had been no violence, only massive looting and mere rumors of violence. Thevenot has also enjoyed celebrity status, based on 9/26.

For a political analogy to Thevenot’s treatment, imagine Richard Nixon’s Watergate cover-up being exposed, but instead of Nixon being forced from office, Congress had given him a standing ovation, and New York City Mayor Abe Beame, gave him a tickertape parade down Manhattan’s Canyon of Heroes.

But things are even more crooked than they so far seem. For whereas 9/6 reported National Guardsmen saying that they had seen with their own eyes 30-40 corpses warehoused in the Convention Center freezer (in addition to four sheet-covered corpses they showed Thevenot in another area), or denouncing the Guardsmen as liars, Thevenot and his 9/26 colleagues cooked up a new story entirely:

One widely circulated tale, told to The Times-Picayune by a slew of evacuees and two Arkansas National Guardsmen, held that “30 or 40 bodies” were stored in a Convention Center freezer. But a formal Arkansas Guard review of the matter later found that no soldier had actually seen the corpses, and that the information came from rumors in the food line for military, police and rescue workers in front of Harrah's New Orleans Casino, said [Lt. Col. John] Edwards, who conducted the review.

Note that the two anonymous National Guardsmen, who on 9/26 are given a new story, in 9/6 were identified as Mikel Brooks and Phillip Thompson. But in 9/6, Thevenot had also mentioned “several other Guardsmen,” none of whom he named.

Scheie vs. Thevenot

By contrast, consider “A Tale of Three Freezers,”Classical Values blogger Eric Scheie’s September 27, 2005 take on Thevenot’s portraits of the Guardsmen in his 9/6 and October/November American Journalism Review articles.

But the two Arkansas National Guardsmen were Thevenot's sources for the "tale" he now says was based on "rumors." They were presented almost as if they were his war comrades -- the type of people who'd never lie.

[Thevenot:] “They wouldn't take me to the freezer in the next room, which they said contained 30 or 40 bodies, a figure still unconfirmed amid a swirl of urban myths churned up by the storm. ‘I ain't got the stomach for it, even after what I saw in Iraq,’ Brooks told me.

I didn't particularly need or want to see more bodies, either. I'd seen quite enough.

“I could tell Brooks had, too. I'd seen his type of agitated mannerisms before in Iraq, the soldier's mind just clicking, clicking, clicking, the mouth spewing out details of death and anarchy. The scenes of bodies would live in his head for some time. I know they'll live in mine.”

[Scheie:] Reading about scenes that will live in his head for a long time, would you get the impression that this is a tale? Or a rumor? That the reporter has been had? I wouldn't.

There's a distinct sense of being there, being led directly through the carnage, of the reporter on the scene being so horrified that the images are literally seared into his memory.

Likewise, returning to the first version (Thevenot's September 6, story, which I was gullible enough to link), one doesn't get a sense of tales or rumors, but gruesome atrocities, factually and courageously reported …

[Thevenot:] Brooks and several other Guardsmen said they had seen between 30 and 40 more bodies in the Convention Center's freezer. "It's not on, but at least you can shut the door," said fellow Guardsman Phillip Thompson.

The scene of rotting bodies inside the Convention Center reflected those in thousands of businesses, schools, homes and shelters across the metropolitan area.

[Scheie:] And now we are told that this scene -- so articulately portrayed by Thevenot, was a tale based on rumors.

I am not impressed. And I am even less impressed by the heavyhanded references to scenes of war carnage which Thevenot repeatedly invoked. It would be one thing had he limited himself to Iraq. After all, he was under stress and he'd been there. But Rwanda?

[Thevenot:] But a week in post-Katrina New Orleans felt like a month in Iraq. Iraq was Iraq. This was home , suddenly plunged into a scene out of "Hotel Rwanda." We've all run out of adequate descriptors, words we couldn't believe appeared on our screens or notepads even as we wrote them: Armageddon, Bedlam, Chaos, Apocalypse, Hell.

[Scheie:] (I don't think I need to get into detail about Rwandan genocide, but Rwanda was not a place where hundreds of people died in flooding from a hurricane.)

Considering that such extreme hyperbole was based on rumors, I'm troubled by Thevenot's claim to ownership of the story:

[Thevenot:]...we've cranked out better journalism in the last two weeks than we have the last two years, and we're getting stronger every day. And Katrina remains our story to own, and we mean to own it.

[Scheie:] Well, he did write it, so I guess it's fair that he should own it.

(Story, tale, rumor, whatever.)

Rumors of Violence

Note that 9/26 used “rumor” in the sense of a lie spread by someone who claims that an unnamed person he knows, or an unnamed person who knows someone he knows, witnessed or experienced something dramatic. But as we shall see, the New Orleans “rumors” of horrific violence were based on the testimony of people, most of whom gave their names, and who claimed to have directly witnessed or endured violent crimes, or seen the corpses of people who had been shot or bludgeoned to death. Said witnesses are either telling the truth or lying, but they are most certainly not spreading “rumors.”

The 9/26 story was dishonest in its attempts to discount violence that not only had been reported by journalists from other news outlets, but which had been reported in many different stories by different reporters appearing on different days in the pages of the Times-Picayune itself.

For Brian Thevenot, Gordon Russell, Jeff Duncan and Gwen Filosa to have a chance at winning over a reader who has read both 9/6 and 9/26, they would have to have condemned National Guardsmen Mikel Brooks and Phillip Thompson as liars for their 9/6 claims. Not only did the reporters not do that, but in different parts of the same story (9/26), they alternately seek to impeach Brooks’ credibility without naming him, and quote him by name as a witness (see next section)!

Disappearing Crime, Times-Picayune-Style

Through a series of quotes from officials, 9/26 sets up the reader to believe that only four people – as opposed to the 34-44 reported on 9/6 – died, whether of natural or unnatural causes, at the Convention Center. The 9/26 team then seeks to shave that number down to only one “suspected” victim of violence.

Just one of the dead appeared to be the victim of foul play, said [NOPD Capt. Jeff] Winn, one of few law enforcement officers who spent any time patrolling the Convention Center before it was secured. Winn, who did the final sweep of the building, said one body appeared to have stab wounds, but he could not be sure. Baldwin also said only one of the dead appeared to have been slain, apparently referring to the same body as Winn described. Bob Johannessen, spokesman for the Department of Health and Hospitals, also confirmed just one suspected homicide at the Convention Center, though he said the victim had been shot, not stabbed. A Washington Post report quoted another soldier who concluded that three of the four people appeared to have been beaten to death, including an older woman in a wheelchair.

But Spc. Mikel Brooks [!], an Arkansas Guardsman who said he wheeled the woman's dead body into the food service entrance, said she appeared to have died of natural causes. Brooks went on to say that the woman had expired sitting next to her husband, who shocked him by asking him to bring the wheelchair back.

So, now we’re supposed to believe Spec. Brooks, even though he was utterly discredited in a different passage of the same 9/26 article.

As for NOPD captain and SWAT team leader Jeff Winn, the 9/26 team also reported his claim that in spite of “aggressively frisking” suspects in the Convention Center, his officers did not find a single weapon. In a building full of 20,000 desperate people, thousands of whom had criminal records, in America’s most violent city?

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Dontrelle Willis just hit his second home run of the game against the Mets, off Mets reliever Bert Hernandez, giving the Marlins a 5-3 lead over the Mets. He also has an RBI-single, giving him three of his team’s five runs. But Willis is the Marlins’ starter! Pitchers don’t hit home runs and run-scoring singles today! Do they?

They do, when they’re named Dontrelle.

And that swing! Willis has one of the sweetest-looking lefthanded swings you’ll ever see. I’ve seen him hit three homers against the Mets (against whom he has all of his three dingers this season), including a grand slam last season.

He was up in the eighth, with a man on first, but unlike with any other pitcher, Marlins manager Joe Girardi didn’t have Willis bunt. Heck, with any other pitcher in the eight inning, you’d have a pinch hitter in the box, but as one of the Mets announcers observed, “Willis is a throwback.”

By the way, did I mention that he’s a lefty?

Girardi had the hit-and-run on, but his old Yankees coach, Willie Randolph, guessed it in the home team dugout, and called a pitchout. Willis tried to protect his runner by reaching out to swing at the pitch, but it was too far away. Mets catcher Paul LoDuca threw a strike, and shortstop Jose Reyes tagged the runner’s pinkie, to get him.

And then Willis calmly resumed his at-bat, hitting the home run.

Later in the inning, Hanley Ramirez scored on a Bert Hernandez wild pitch to make the score 6-3, which is where it now stands, after eight.

Did the New Orleans Times-Picayune win two Pulitzer Prizes for a journalistic fraud? It sure looks that way.

New Orleans Times-Picayune reporters Brian Thevenot, Gordon Russell, Jeff Duncan and Gwen Filosa; managing editors, news, Peter Kovacs and Dan Shea; and editor Jim Amoss, are the newest winners of the Duranty-Blair Prize for Journalistic Infamy, for their September 26, 2005 attempt to “untell” the story of the savage violence that befell New Orleans just before and after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29 of last year.

The previous Duranty-Blair winner was former CBS News producer Mary Mapes, who engineered what became known as the “Memogate” (aka Rathergate) hoax, shortly before the 2004 election, in an effort to swing the election toward Democrat challenger, Sen. John Kerry (MA).

The Duranty-Blair Prize is named for two of the most notorious scoundrels in the history of American journalism, Walter Duranty and Jayson Blair, both of whom were New York Times reporters. (See Jayson Blair I, II, and III.)

On April 17, the "Times-Pic" won two Pulitzer Prizes for Public Service and Breaking News Reporting for a September 26, 2005 story that had immediately been discredited by the bloggers “ziel” of Your Lying Eyes and Eric Scheie at Classical Values.

Thanks primarily to the new Duranty-Blair winners, one year and three weeks after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, the general public knows much less about what happened in New Orleans, than it did a year ago.

The two most influential stories on post-Katrina New Orleans were both published by the Times-Picayune, the city’s only major newspaper, on September 6 and September 26, 2005, respectively. (For brevity’s sake, hereafter I will refer simply to "9/6" and to "9/26," respectively.)

When 9/6 was published, telling tales of bone-chilling savagery, it immediately became part of the worldwide, 24/7, mainstream media (MSM) echo chamber. Twenty days later, 9/26 thoroughly contradicted and sought to discredit 9/6, painting a picture of New Orleans as racked with looters, desperation, and contaminated floodwaters, yet free of violence. The 9/26 story never cited 9/6, much less noted that 9/6 had been published by the same newspaper, or that one of the 9/26 reporters, Brian Thevenot, had been the sole author of 9/6. The 9/26 story immediately became part of the worldwide, 24/7 MSM echo chamber, with no MSM personalities questioning its veracity, mentioning the discrepancies between the two stories, or the fact that both stories were published by the same newspaper. But whereas the politically unpalatable 9/6 story was sent down the memory hole, the politically acceptable 9/26 story has been promoted ever since by the MSM. Somewhere, George Orwell is smiling.

"[Mikel] Brooks and several other Guardsmen said they had seen between 30 and 40 more bodies in the Convention Center’s freezer. ‘It’s not on, but at least you can shut the door,’ said fellow Guardsman Phillip Thompson."

Thevenot also quoted Brooks as saying that there was "a 7-year-old with her throat cut" in the freezer.

He moved on, walking quickly through the darkness, pulling his camouflage shirt to his face to screen out the overwhelming odor. "There’s an old woman," he said, pointing to a wheelchair covered by a sheet. "I escorted her in myself. And that old man got bludgeoned to death," he said of the body lying on the floor next to the wheelchair….

Brooks and his unit came to New Orleans not long after serving a year of combat duty in Iraq, taking on gunfire and bombs, while losing comrades with regularity. Still, the scene at the Convention Center, where they conducted an evacuation this week, left him shell-shocked.

"I ain’t got the stomach for it, even after what I saw in Iraq," said Brooks, referring to the freezer where the bulk of the bodies sat decomposing. "In Iraq, it’s one-on-one. It’s war. It’s fair. Here, it’s just crazy. It’s anarchy. When you get down to killing and raping people in the streets for food and water … And this is America. This is just 300 miles south of where I live."

(In a featured article by Brian Thevenot in the October/November 2005 American Journalism Review, "Apocalypse in New Orleans," he repeated his most dramatic stories.)

On 9/6, the only story Thevenot related from National Guardsmen who did not claim to have first-hand knowledge of its truth, was the following:

One of the bodies, they said, was a girl they estimated to be 5 years old. Though they could not confirm it, they had heard she was gang-raped.

Note that the Guardsmen were quite sure that they had the five-year-old’s corpse.

Realizing after 9/6 that they had violated the taboo against presenting black folks behaving badly, especially after blacks across the country had voiced outrage at the media for referring to black looters as, um, "looters," (or even referring to black refugees as "refugees") and/or because Times-Picayune editors and staffers remembered, 'Hey, we’ve got to live here,' the newspaper reversed course, and "untold" the huge story it had broken.

Unlike Superman, however, the folks at the Times-Pic could not reverse time by flying against the Earth’s axis faster than the speed of light, so they had to be more creative.

In case the reader has come to believe that 9/6 was indeed a phony story, and thus would tend to believe a story contradicting it, I ask him to keep in mind the following points: Thevenot and the Times-Picayune did not retract or correct 9/6; and as I will demonstrate in this series, through the work of many journalists, including some at the Times-Picayune, 9/26 was itself a fraudulent story.

1. That following 9/6, but prior to 9/26, the 9/6 story’s most dramatic charges "of dead children in the Convention Center" had been denounced by police Superintendent Eddie Compass as "vicious rumors," but the Times-Picayune had never printed a correction (Bonnie Wren);

2. The charge that the 9/26 claim that "rumors" and "exaggerations" had asserted that there were over 200 corpses at the Superdome, was a strawman argument intended, by counterposing it to extremely low "true" body counts, to discredit all stories of post-Katrina mayhem ("ziel" at Your Lying Eyes); and

3. The 9/26 charges that the most dramatic stories about the Convention Center were "exaggerations" and rumor-mongering would mean that Thevenot and the Times-Picayune had been guilty of "exaggerations" and rumor-mongering (Eric Scheie).

Regarding the second criticism, it is only in Thevenot’s solo December/January AJRarticle, in which he claimed to be debunking claims of 300 corpses warehoused at one school, that he cited one specific media report, a September 5, 2005 article in London’s Financial Times, that he said spoke of masses of corpses warehoused in a school in St. Bernard Parish. I do not recall hearing or reading echoes of the Financial Times article at the time.

In response to the second and third criticisms, respectively, on September 26, in “WHO'S COMPLAINING ABOUT WHOSE EXAGGERATIONS?,” Eric Scheie scratched his head, in response to 9/26 and Thevenot, since Thevenot was "condemning" bad reporting, while "By implication, he's now saying that his own story, which I was unfortunate enough to link before in the assumption that it was accurate, was either lying or exaggerated…. and completely failing to point out that his own story played a key role."

The Four Faces of Brian

Let me sum up the World According to Thevenot (& Co., in the case of 9/26).

1. In 9/6: Every atrocity in the book occurred in the convention center (ditto, in the October/November AJR article, which Thevenot surely wrote prior to 9/26);

2. In 9/26, Thevenot, Russell, Duncan and Filosa claimed that "rumors" were responsible for the beliefs worldwide about savagery in post-Katrina New Orleans, and strongly suggested that there was in fact no savagery at all, and that there was no firing on rescue workers and other helpers (soldiers, doctors, policemen, contractors seeking to repair the breaches, et al.) at the Convention Center, Superdome, or anywhere else in post-Katrina New Orleans. Indeed, they cited Orleans Parish (known elsewhere as New Orleans) DA Eddie Jordan as saying that "authorities had confirmed only four murders in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina - making it a typical week …"

And based on the 9/26 quote of Louisiana National Guard Maj. David Baldwin, who insisted that despite 30,000 desperate people, a substantial proportion of whom would have been criminals, being stuck for five days without food, water, toilets or electricity in the Superdome, only one gunshot was fired the whole time, we would have to conclude that the Superdome was the safest place in America’s most violent city.

But what about the Convention Center?

According to 9/26, in spite of 20,000 people being stuck for five days in the Convention Center in even worse conditions (i.e., no security) than in the Superdome, when a detachment of 1,000 soldiers and police led by Louisiana National Guard Lt. Col. Jacques Thibodeaux eventually arrived, it "found no evidence, witnesses or victims of any killings, rapes or beatings, Thibodeaux said."

The 9/26 team also reported NOPD SWAT team leader Capt. Jeff Winn’s claim that, in spite of "aggressively frisking" suspects in the Convention Center, his officers did not find a single weapon.

If Col. Thibodeaux and Capt. Winn are to be believed, in the days immediately following Katrina, the Convention Center was the safest place in America.

(When the Superdome and Convention Center refugees were sent to other cities, and local officials did criminal background checks on them, the officials found that up to 54.7 percent of the refugees, men and women, had criminal records. When other cities requested help from the Department of Homeland Security with criminal background checks of refugees, DHS refused, presumably anticipating embarrassing results.)

Nowhere does the 9/26 team admit to having caused the "rumored" beliefs in question;

3. On October 3, Thevenot apparently lied to Eric Scheie, in asserting that Thevenot had retracted 9/6;

4. In Thevenot’s December/January AJR article, he asserted that 9/26 was a "correction" of 9/6, and again argued that in spite of massive looting, New Orleans was not plagued by violence in Katrina’s wake.

That would have been a first in human history.

* * *

The first law of lying is plausibility.

(In a rare positive aspect of 9/26, the reporters did suggest that low official estimates of post-Katrina rapes may not have been accurate.)

One expects such pathological dissembling and the constant production of new stories which contradict previously told ones from criminals, junkies, drunks and politicians. Thevenot and his editor and reporter accomplices could count on few civilians (non-journalists and non-academics) reading all of the various stories cited here; that judges on the Pulitzer committee would cover for them, however, is scary.

In Thevenot’s December-January AJR story, he attacked Eric Scheie and other bloggers who had made valid criticisms of him, while refusing to name them -- so that readers could not check out the criticisms for themselves -- and without giving the context for their criticisms:

Some branded me a hypocrite for writing about myth-making after I'd earlier reported one of the myths, the '30 or 40' bodies.

Instead, the only Internet critic Thevenot named was ChronWatch’s Lester Dent, whose criticism Thevenot was, so he says, able to refute. (In the meantime, Lester Dent seems to have vanished, and ChronWatch editor Jim Sparkman, did not respond to an e-mail.)

On October 1, Eric Scheie of Classical Values reported receiving an e-mail from Thevenot, in which the latter complained,

Did you somehow miss the portion of the follow-up story in which I debunked my own myth about the 40 bodies in the freezer? Did you not bother to read the whole story? I admitted my own mistake, under my own byline, and in again in interviews with news stations and newspapers that interviewed me about myths at the Dome and Convention Center. And now you purport to expose me after I exposed myself?

(Thevenot did not respond to an October 11, 2005 e-mail from this writer.)

Thevenot was referring above to 9/26, but nowhere in that story had he admitted his mistake. And while in his second AJR story, two months after he had lectured Scheie, Thevenot did confess to having spread the "myth about the 40 bodies in the freezer," even there he did not claim to have made said confession in his media interviews. Indeed, had he done so, his celebrity likely would have vanished. He was, after all, being interviewed, for having "busted" a myth, not for having foisted one on the public, and then "corrected" it.

While millions of civilians heard of or read 9/6 and/or 9/26, the second AJR story was primarily read by a few thousand leftwing journalism professors not known for their diligence or intellectual integrity.

Is it possible that some exaggerated statements were made about specific acts of violence in the Superdome or the Convention Center? Anything’s possible. But jumping from one bandwagon to another is not good for one’s ankles, especially when one has no good reason for jumping, and the person prodding one to jump has been exposed as a serial liar.

Saturday, September 16, 2006

When New York Mets ace Pedro Martinez came out of tonight’s game in Pittsburgh after only three innings and 68 pitches, and with his team losing 4-0, he sat down at the end of the dugout bench and held his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking.

“Is he crying?” blurted out Mets announcer and former great, Keith Hernandez. Then, thinking better of it, Hernandez went silent.

It has been a rough season for the future Hall of Famer. The 34-year-old righthander was sidelined for much of spring training with a toe injury. Due to a strained right calf, he hadn’t started a game since August 14. And earlier, due to a freak hip injury, he had missed a month wrapped around the All-Star break. Thus was his record only 9-5 coming into tonight’s game, in which the Mets had the opportunity to clinch the NL East Division title with a win or a Philadelphia loss.

But then, as a young player in the early 1990s’ Dodgers organization, Martinez’ frail little body (5’10” and maybe 160 lbs.) was considered inadequate to the rigors of being a big league starting pitcher – which it was – and thus the Dodgers used him as reliever, before unloading him to the Montreal Expos. You might say that Pedro Martinez has been defying nature ever since.

The hip injury had come during a game in which Martinez donned a long sleeve shirt under his jersey. The home plate umpire decided the shirt was too long, and ordered Martinez to go into the clubhouse, and cut the sleeves. While following the ump’s orders, Martinez slipped on the clubhouse floor. Thereafter, he pitched a few ineffective starts, before being sat down, and getting treatment for the hip.

Note that “freak” injuries and aging pitchers (see also: aging quarterbacks) go together. And Pedro is an old 34. In other words, those “freak” injuries aren’t freaky, but rather signs of a body that is breaking down after over 2600 innings on the mound. After the game, Mets announcer Gary Cohen observed, “It’s been one thing after another this year for Pedro: The toe, the hip, the calf.”

One of the Mets announcers had just observed that Martinez had “the weight of the franchise on his shoulders.” Mets skipper Willie Randolph had just announced that Martinez would be the Game 1 starter in the playoffs.

After watching the scene on the bench, Gary Cohen asked if Martinez was just unhappy with his performance. His partner, Keith Hernandez, responded, “Unhappy with your performance to the point of tears? You’re a professional. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

Later in the game, Mets reporter Chris Cotter informed fans, “He just reached his pitch count … some pretty high-level sources said there was no indication” that the calf strain had been aggravated. [A pitch count of 68? Gimme a break, Chris.]

After the game, which the Mets lost, 5-3, for Martinez’ sixth loss, SportsNet NY again showed the image after Martinez came out of the game, of Mets skipper Willie Randolph with his arm around his shoulder, talking to him, and patting him on the back, followed by Mets pitching coach Rick Peterson. Then the two men left Martinez, and the shoulder-shaking began. [For SNY’s sports round-up following the postgame show, it would cut out that part of the tape, and just show Martinez heading for the showers.]

After the game, Keith Hernandez opined, “If it’s just from a bad game, it’s an overreaction …,” while Gary Cohen observed, “It’s unusual to see elite athletes react in this way.”

After the game, speaking from SNY’s Manhattan studio, postgame show host Matt Yaloff said, “The champagne is on ice, as is Pedro Martinez’ right calf.” So much for those “high-level sources.” (As Ron Darling would later note, “The Mets play everything close to the vest.”)

Continuing, Yaloff recalled that we’d seen Pedro get creamed before, and even lose in the playoffs. “We’ve never seen THAT.”

Yaloff cautioned Mets fans against becoming hysterical, although as both hosts observed, the team’s postseason chances depend to a large degree on Martinez’ health.

Yaloff’s studio co-host, former Mets pitching great Ron Darling, said of Martinez, “Seeing that scene in the dugout lets me know that he is not in the place he wants to be on September 15.”

“He’s the only guy in the Mets rotation that has a cape, like Superman, when he’s good. Tonight, he wasn’t.”

Yaloff spoke to the irony of the Mets being one game away from clinching the divisional championship, while the player who had turned around the franchise in two short years was “hanging his head” in the Mets dugout.

In Mets manager Willie Randolph’s routine post-game meeting with the press, he repeated the company line: “He’s fine.”

When asked if Martinez would be making his next start, Randolph said, “Yes, he is.” Randolph responded to a rephrased version of the same question, “No, I said he’s fine.”

Randolph also tried to deflect attention from Martinez’ reaction, saying that players often become emotional in the heat of battle (“he’s a warrior”), citing the recent case of Mets rookie pitcher Brian Bannister.

“Like I said, he’s a competitor, a warrior. I see that all the time. Guys can’t do anything on the bench, without it being reported.”

From the studio, Ron Darling reacted with, “We report that as the truth. But the fact is that he couldn’t get the Pirates out over three innings…. And that’s a sign – not the sign – that he’s not ready yet.” [The Pirates are the second-worst team in the league.]

Then the show returned to Pittsburgh, where Pedro Martinez answered questions from reporters.

The first question was about the condition of his calf.

“No, no, I’m fine, I’m fine. I was just a little frustrated, and I was about to snap, and Willie [Randolph] had to ….

[Martinez would later contradict himself to a different reporter, admitting that he could not push off from the calf, and that since in pitching, everything starts with the legs, he could not command his pitches; thus did pitching at all become a risky matter.]

Reporter [each following question came from a different reporter]: You’ve pitched badly before [unclear] – why tonight?

“Because I worked my ass off, and I didn’t see the results that I was expecting. And only I know what I go through everyday, working, and I tried to get back on track, and now, you know, I [unclear] an opportunity to show my teammates and show the team that I’m going to be back, and it wasn’t quite as high as I was expecting, and my physical body didn’t feel quite as well as I was expecting, you know, for the time being, and the performance also was a little bit off from what I was expecting….”

“I was expecting to have a little better command, have better breaking balls, and have more command of my pitches, and I didn’t have any of them.”

[With only two weeks left in the regular season, a reporter asked Martinez if he is concerned as to whether he can be ready in time for the playoffs.]

“I’ll have to say I still have plenty of time to do it. It’s just that when you come off so many days without throwing the ball, you want to make a statement. You know, you want to look better for your teammates. Today was a special day – is a special day for us, and I wanted to do a little bit better.”

Reporter: Were you actually crying?

“I was about to, I was about to snap, and later on [garbled], thank God, Willie was there, and told me, ‘It’s going to be o.k.’ I was just about to snap, … and actually, I felt like crying at that time, out of frustration, but I kept my composure….

[A reporter asked a question about players crying.]

“You just don’t see [players crying]. Normally we do it in the locker room….”

Reporter: You know, a lot of people have been waiting for you to get back, a lot of Mets fans, waiting for that division, they see this game, and there’s probably going to be some, “Oh, no”s. What is your response?

“‘Oh, no’? Well, they need to be patient, because, three innings in what, thirty days? Isn’t it enough … They’d be impertinent to ask for that. [A reporter laughs.] My first three innings, I’m trying to get back, and I’m going to be back. If they want to throw the white towel now on me? It’s up to them. I’m not throwing it yet.”

I hope that Martinez’ proud, defiant attitude pulls him through. I don’t recall him weeping after either of his defeats in league championship games at the hands of the Yankees in 2003 and 2004. But an elite athlete may exhibit the “unusual” reaction of which Gary Cohen spoke, if his body betrays him in such a way as to cause him to fear that his time may be up. After all, since the 2004 postseason, Pedro Martinez has been pitching – and pitching very well – on little more than personal pride and a defiance of nature.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

At least one of the questions on the minds of people following the Doris Phillips kidnapping case has been answered: The suspect in custody is not an illegal, or even an amnestied, formerly illegal immigrant.

On late Tuesday afternoon, Lt. Clint Tims of the Ellis County (TX) Sheriff’s Department told this reporter that suspect Miguel Arciba was born “in the state of Texas.”

Following the loss of her husband two years ago, Mrs. Phillips lived alone in Reagor Springs, between Waxahachie and Ennis, in Ellis County, Texas, 40 miles south of Dallas. Her body was found on Friday in an abandoned farmhouse near the town of Bardwell. Lt. Tims said that the cause of death has not yet been established. That may explain why murder charges have not yet brought against Arciba. (Even if the proximate cause of Mrs. Phillips’ death should be determined to have been non-violent, such as a heart attack, her death would still count as a murder due to the circumstance and stress of having been kidnapped.)

On September 3, 49-year-old Miguel Arciba was arrested in the case, based on his possession of a stolen item of Mrs. Phillips’ property. According to news reports, Arciba had allegedly been harassing Mrs. Phillips to sell him some old farm equipment lying in disuse on her spread.

Arciba may have unwittingly confessed to Mrs. Phillips’ murder. He led lawmen to Mrs. Phillips’ body, and confessed to burglarizing her home, but insisted that he had had nothing to do with the victim’s kidnapping and death, maintaining that an “accomplice” had actually kidnapped and murdered the kindly cotton farm widow.

Lt. Tims told this reporter that “[Arciba's] been charged with aggravated robbery, aggravated kidnapping, and burglary of a habitation.” No other suspects are currently in custody.

According to Lt. Tims, because of the kidnapping charge, and the denial by Texas state law (as in many other states) of a difference in culpability for an accomplice to murder, the kidnapping charge will – eventually – encompass a murder charge, as well. (The classic case is of a bank robbery, in which one of the robbers inside the bank kills someone, and the getaway driver is charged with the same murder count as the shooter.)

Lt. Sims said that Arciba has a long list of prior offenses, but as to whether he has served time in prison, “can’t tell you that.”

According to a report by the Dallas Fort-Worth Star-Telegram’sJack Douglas Jr., “Beginning when he was about 17, Arciba lived on Phillips' farm for a time while several members of his family worked for the victim as farm hands.”

Monday, September 11, 2006

As Mets announcer Gary Cohen said a couple of innings ago in Florida, “The Marlins needed nine home runs to match their team record, but they didn’t expect to get them all in one game.”

The Marlins now have five home runs in the game, with a little help from the umpires. When the Marlins’ Cody Ross came up to bat in the seventh inning with a man on, he had already hit two upper deck jobs to left field, a three-run dinger and a two-run job, raising his season total from nine to eleven. On a full count, Mets reliever Royce Ring threw Ross a fastball, and he hit a long foul ball into the seats just left of the left field “fair” pole (i.e., a foul ball to non-baseball fans). But Ross started to jog around the bases, while stealing a look toward the home plate umpire, who did nothing to discourage him. Ring protested, to no avail, which means that an umpire had to have given the home run sign, of a finger going ‘round in the air.

Yesterday, in the last game of a home stand against Los Angeles, the Mets couldn’t pitch, hit, catch the ball, or turn a double play, and lost 9-1. (I know; I was there with my six-year-old. A hell of a way to get your first taste of big league baseball. How many years of therapy will it take, for him to get over the trauma?) Even the Los Angeles pitcher, Eric Stults, hit a rope up the middle for a hit, in going one-for-two.

I figured that would be the Mets’ worst game of the year, and that they would have it out of their system. I figured wrong.

Tonight, not only did Marlins righthander Anibel Sanchez (coming off a no-hitter) look like Bob Gibson on the mound, but Sanchez got hits his first two times at bat (equaling his previous season total), and drove in a run.

The game just ended, with the Marlins winning 16-5. That’s a baseball score, folks.

In a quiet TV ad that has been running in the New York market, people silently show where they were on 911, when they heard the news. A woman sits on her bed; a man is in what looks to be an empty fire station common room; another man points to an empty subway car. The isolation speaks to lost loved ones and comrades not in the picture, to the aloneness of grief that has not subsided.

The ad is for an organization seeking to get the stalled 911 memorial moving again. I don’t know anything about the organization, so I can’t say whether they’re the good guys or the bad guys in a politicized battle. I hope they’re the good guys.

In any event, seeing the ad moves me just as much five years later.

Whenever I see the film clips or the images of 911, I feel the same as I did back then.

A few weeks after 911, some of the most powerful commercials ever made were broadcast. One of them, sponsored by Dow Jones, the stock market people, showed a few silent men in business attire standing in an office, looking into the camera. But they were not grieving. One man in particular stood out. He was a tall, broad-shouldered black man of about 40 in shirtsleeves, arms crossed, and with a grimly determined jaw. The word “strength” flashed on the screen.

Another ad, by local talk radio station WABC, showed a few well-chosen words on a backdrop of red, white, and blue, with the voices of children in the background.

There are some things about which you’re not supposed to “move on,” at least not in the public sense.

I realize that some people who lost the person whom they considered the love of their life that day, have since fallen in love with, or even married someone else. I am the last person to begrudge them their happiness. That’s the private sense of “moving on.” Those who were directly hit on 911 will never feel the same about that day as the rest of us. But if someone told me he no longer felt moved at the anniversary of 911, I would think him less than fully human.

Not everyone feels the same.

Some qualify the worst day in American history as “one of the worst days.”

I can still remember getting up that morning at 10 a.m. As I wrote at the time, on the radio an announcer intoned, “The World Trade Center is under attack.”

We were only able to get a snow-filled picture from the local CBS affiliate (the other broadcast channels all had had their antennas on the roof of one of the World Trade Center towers). We saw the remaining tower, amid clouds of debris from its sister tower, which had just gone down. I figured it was all an overly dramatic version of those Emergency Broadcast System tests (“This is a test….”). But it was no test. Three thousand dead in New York, the Pentagon, and a field outside of Shanksville, PA attest to that.

Remembering Heroes

Some positives remain from that day.

A handful of heroic passengers and crew members on United Airlines Flight 93, took a stand and stopped that airliner from reaching the terrorists’ likely target, the Capitol Building.

Rudy Giuliani, who himself escaped from the World Trade Center that morning by the skin of his teeth, and lost many friends there, gave a lesson for the ages in leadership and grit.

And giants walked the earth: 343 firemen and 60 policemen, as well as “civilians” like 24-year-old Sandler O’Neil equities trader, Welles Crowther, a Nyack, NY volunteer fireman, ran straight into the mouth of hell to save countless others, never themselves to re-emerge. As Tennyson wrote in “The Charge of the Light Brigade,”

When can their glory fade?O the wild charge they made! All the world wondered.Honor the charge they made,Honor the Light Brigade, Noble six hundred.

Our president, who seems to have lost his way, in seeking to fight wars in Moslem countries, while leaving our own nation open to invasion and terrorism, has recently said that we are at war with “Islamic fascists.” This was unsatisfactory for former Navy secretary and 911 commission prima donna John Lehman, who insisted in an op-ed essay that has been making the rounds in syndication, that we are at war with people who misrepresent Islam (sounds like a play on the “religion of peace” nonsense).

The Bush administration continues to muddle a national understanding of the conflict we are in by calling it the “war on terror.” This political correctness presumably seeks to avoid hurting the feelings of the Saudis and other Muslims, but it comes at high cost. This is not a war against terror any more than World War II was a war against kamikazes.

We are at war with jihadists motivated by a violent ideology based on an extremist interpretation of the Islamic faith.

No, Mr. Secretary, we are at war with jihadis motivated by a proper interpretation of the Islamic faith. The problem isn’t “Islamism,” it’s Islam.

And yet, I fear that such tough talk from the President is just election-year rhetoric, meant to galvanize the base (i.e., “the suckers”).

And treason never seems to go out of fashion. New York Times executive editor Bill Keller is reportedly bragging, in a new New York magazine story, about how he stood up to Pres. Bush’s pressure not to compromise the National Security Agency program eavesdropping on the cell phone calls of domestic Al Qaeda supporters. The compromising of that program won the paper, in the person of Timesman James Risen, yet another dubious Pulitzer Prize.

One could easily yearn for the sort of national unity of purpose immediately following 911, for a contemporary “moral equivalent of war,” notwithstanding that – as millions seem to have forgotten – we are still at war! But then one recalls that not even three weeks after 911, unity was lacking.

Talking of an impending “quagmire” in Afghanistan (yes, Afghanistan!), the New York Times tried to sandbag America out of striking back against Al Qaeda. Unsurprisingly, now that real torture, administered exclusively by Arabs, has returned to the daily routine at Abu Ghraib prison, the newspaper that through exaggeration and disloyalty fabricated a “torture scandal” at the same prison, in order to hamstring the war effort, has fallen silent.

Immediately following 911, the socialist/communist Left insisted that we not exact “revenge” against those who had attacked us. Eventually, they would call on our troops to shoot their own officers. When pro-Japanese traitors such as Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad sought to undermine the war effort following Pearl Harbor, they were jailed for sedition, and spent the duration in prison.

And in late September 2001, the Rev. Al Sharpton spoke for millions of frustrated blacks outraged over the seemingly indomitable Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s pre- and post-911 triumphs, in spite of Sharpton’s earlier threats to do to the city what Al Qaeda ultimately did do.

“We elected you mayor, not Messiah. You didn't bring us together, our pain brought us together and our decency brought us together.”

Decency, indeed, Rev. Al. And who is "we"?

And there was no lack of stupid Democrat tricks, like former counter-terrorism czar Dick Clarke writing a thoroughly dishonest book about 911, in order to help the Democrats win the 2004 election, or Clinton national security advisor Sandy Berger getting caught stuffing classified, pre-911 national security documents in his underwear at the National Archives, after he had already stolen and destroyed other essential documents, in an attempt to protect his old chief from the judgment of history for the latter’s lapses against Islamic terror.

Friday, September 08, 2006

In the fifth inning tonight, Los Angeles’ shortstop Rafael Furcal hit a solo home run off a knee-high, 91 mph fastball from rookie Mets righthander John Maine. The next hitter, first baseman Nomar Garciaparra, hit a homer off a high, 91-mph fastball. Then outfielder J.D. Drew came up, and likewise hit the ball out of the park, to center. In Drew’s case, however, Mets centerfielder Carlos Beltran had a different idea. As the ball sailed over the center field fence, Beltran leapt, speared the ball, and brought it back.

After five, Los Angeles leads 4-0, on two first inning runs that scored on an errant thrown by Mets third baseman David Wright, and on Furcal and Garciaparra’s respective home runs.

Thursday, September 07, 2006

The Mets just completed their second consecutive shutout victory. Their pitchers have not given up a run in 25 innings. Forty-year-old Mets lefthander Tom Glavine (13-6), who had his curve ball working, pitched six and one-third innings, giving up only five hits and no walks, while striking out five batters. Glavine got his first win since August 5, and only his second since the All-Star break. That gave him 288 lifetime wins, tying him with Tommy John for 23rd on the all-time wins list. Among active pitchers, only Roger Clemens (347) and Greg Maddux (330) have more wins.

A few minutes ago, in the bottom of the seventh inning at Shea Stadium, Matt Kemp, a corner outfielder subbing in centerfield for Los Angeles, misplayed his third fly ball of the evening. Kemp’s playing of a too shallow center gave Mets third baseman David Wright a double on a fly ball that should have a long out. Earlier in the game, Kemp’ insistence on playing center too shallow gave Mets first baseman Carlos Delgado a gift double in the first inning, and shortstop Jose Reyes a gift inside-the-park, three-run homer in the sixth.

Anyone who knows or believes that a friend or loved one who was murdered in California between 1970 and 1974, was a victim of the Nation of Islam’s “death angels” assassins, please contact me. I am seeking to record and remember all of the victims, estimated variously at from 71 to “just under 270.” With the passage of time, and the passing of some of those who worked the case, or who held onto crucial memories or information, remembering the victims becomes more arduous, but no less a sacred duty. If you have any information, please contact me at Add1dda@aol.com.

On October 20, the tenth annual Zebra Victims Memorial Service will be held from 12 noon to 1 p.m. on the plaza-side steps of San Francisco City Hall. Although it is now known that the NOI murdered whites prior to October 20, that date, on which Quita Hague was murdered, was long believed to be the onset of the San Francisco genocide campaign. For additional information on the memorial, go to http://www.eaif.org/zebra/index.html, and contact Lou Calabro at eaifpres@aol.com.

Originally published on Wednesday, August 30, 2006.Revised, expanded version published at 2 a.m., Wednesday, September 6, 2006.Last updated at 3 a.m., Sunday, September 10, 2006.Correction at 1:06 a.m., on August 8, 2010: All references to a single Times-Picayune Pulitzer Prize were changed to "two" Pulitzer Prizes.

Did the New Orleans Times-Picayune win two Pulitzer Prizes for a journalistic fraud? It sure looks that way.

New Orleans Times-Picayune reporters Brian Thevenot, Gordon Russell, Jeff Duncan and Gwen Filosa; managing editors, news, Peter Kovacs and Dan Shea; and editor Jim Amoss, are the newest winners of the Duranty-Blair Award for Journalistic Infamy, for their September 26, 2005 attempt to “untell” the story of the savage violence that befell New Orleans just before and after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29 of last year.

The previous Duranty-Blair winner was former CBS News producer Mary Mapes, who engineered what became known as the “Memogate” (aka Rathergate) hoax, shortly before the 2004 election, in an effort to swing the election toward Democrat challenger, Sen. John Kerry (MA).

The Duranty-Blair Award is named for two of the most notorious scoundrels in the history of American journalism, Walter Duranty and Jayson Blair, both of whom were New York Times reporters. (See Jayson Blair I, II, and III.)

On April 17, the Times-Picayune won two Pulitzer Prizes for a September 26, 2005 story that had immediately been discredited by the bloggers “ziel” of Your Lying Eyes and Eric Scheie at Classical Values. Two weeks later, building on their work, it was also discredited by this writer.

Thanks primarily to the new Duranty-Blair winners, one year and one week after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, the general public knows much less about what happened in New Orleans, than it did a year ago.

The two most influential stories on post-Katrina New Orleans were both published by the Times-Picayune, the city’s only major newspaper, on September 6 and 26, respectively.

“[Mikel] Brooks and several other Guardsmen said they had seen between 30 and 40 more bodies in the Convention Center's freezer. ‘It's not on, but at least you can shut the door,’ said fellow Guardsman Phillip Thompson.”

Thevenot also quoted Brooks as saying that there was “a 7-year-old with her throat cut" in the freezer.

He moved on, walking quickly through the darkness, pulling his camouflage shirt to his face to screen out the overwhelming odor. “There's an old woman,” he said, pointing to a wheelchair covered by a sheet. “I escorted her in myself. And that old man got bludgeoned to death,” he said of the body lying on the floor next to the wheelchair….

Brooks and his unit came to New Orleans not long after serving a year of combat duty in Iraq, taking on gunfire and bombs, while losing comrades with regularity. Still, the scene at the Convention Center, where they conducted an evacuation this week, left him shell-shocked.

“I ain't got the stomach for it, even after what I saw in Iraq,” said Brooks, referring to the freezer where the bulk of the bodies sat decomposing. “In Iraq, it's one-on-one. It's war. It's fair. Here, it's just crazy. It's anarchy. When you get down to killing and raping people in the streets for food and water … And this is America. This is just 300 miles south of where I live.”

As blogger Bonnie Wren noted in a letter she sent to Times-Picayune editors and Duranty-Blair laureates Peter Kovacs, Dan Shea, and Jim Amoss (which they chose not to publish), “This [9/6] story received widespread circulation all over the world.”

(In a featured article by Brian Thevenot in the October/November 2005 American Journalism Review, “Apocalypse in New Orleans,” he repeated his most dramatic stories.)

Hereafter, for brevity’s sake, I will refer simply to “9/6” and to “9/26,” respectively.

On 9/6, the only story Thevenot related from a National Guardsmen who did not claim to have first-hand knowledge of its truth, was the following:

One of the bodies, they said, was a girl they estimated to be 5 years old. Though they could not confirm it, they had heard she was gang-raped.

Note that the Guardsmen were quite sure that they had the five-year-old’s corpse.

Realizing after 9/6 that they had violated the taboo against presenting black folks behaving badly, especially following blacks across the country voiced outrage at the media for referring to black looters as, um, “looters,” and/or because Times-Picayune editors and staffers remembered, ‘Hey, we’ve got to live here,’ the newspaper reversed course, and “untold” the huge story it had broken.

Unlike Superman, however, the folks at the Times-Picayune could not reverse time by flying against the Earth’s axis more rapidly than the speed of light, so they had to be more creative.

In case the reader has come to believe that 9/6 was indeed a phony story, and thus would tend to believe a story debunking it, I ask him to keep in mind the following points: Thevenot did not retract his 9/6 story; and as I will demonstrate, through my own research and the help of several other journalists, 9/26 was a false story.

Discredited from the Get-Go

In a September 26 story, “Rumors of deaths greatly exaggerated; Widely reported attacks false or unsubstantiated; 6 bodies found at Dome; 4 at Convention Center,” four Times–Picayune reporters claimed to have followed up on, and disproved, the most dramatic stories, including Thevenot’s 9/6 story.

The initial criticisms of Thevenot & Co. were:

1. That 9/6 had been altered (Scheie; unfortunately, the Times-Pic is not archived in the “Wayback Machine”);

2. That 9/26 claims that “rumors” had asserted that there were over 200 corpses at the Superdome, were a straw-man argument intended, by counterposing them to extremely low “true” body counts, to discredit all stories of mayhem (ziel at Your Lying Eyes);

3. That following 9/6, but prior to 9/26, the story’s most dramatic charges “of dead children in the Convention Center” had been denounced by police Superintendent Compass as “vicious rumors,” but the Times-Picayune had never printed a correction; and in a related but richer vein,

4. The 9/26 charges that the most dramatic stories about the Convention Center were “exaggerations” and rumor-mongering would mean that Thevenot and the Times-Picayune had been guilty of “exaggerations” and rumor-mongering.

Regarding the first criticism, Eric Scheie cited gruesome material that he claimed was is the original 9/6, but no longer is in its Web version.

In the matter of the second criticism, the 9/26 team (and in a separate article, Thevenot alone, who claimed to be debunking claims of 300 corpses warehoused at one school) claimed to be responding to rumors spread by the national and foreign media that had determined most people’s impressions about post-Katrina anarchy, but I was not then and am still not aware of any such national or foreign media reports, nor were any of the bloggers or journalists whom I’ve favorably cited above.

Thevenot & Co. conjured up incredibly exaggerated reports of murder victims that were supposedly in circulation earlier, even though no one else can recall hearing them at the time.

Usually when someone tries to avoid responsibility for assigning blame to others, I'm not terribly impressed, unless it appears that the person trying to shift blame helped create the problem. And I'm wondering what's going on with the Times Picayune's Brian Thevenot, who's taking a hard line in condemning earlier gruesome reports of crime which he now says were untrue….

[Scheie then quotes a long passage from 9/26]

“….

[Thevenot:] “Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence…. The piles of bodies never materialized, and soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines say that although anarchy reigned at times and people suffered unimaginable indignities, most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened.”

[Scheie:] The above is certainly good news by any standard. But what's troubling to me is that some of the bad news was reported by Thevenot himself. By implication, he's now saying that his own story, which I was unfortunate enough to link before in the assumption that it was accurate, was either lying or exaggerated. The link I posted to Thevenot's earlier Times-Picayune story now goes nowhere except to the story Glenn [Reynolds, of instapundit.com] links today. But via the Kansas City Star, here's the earlier Times-Picayune story (edited version, unfortunately) which still bears Thevenot's name:

[Scheie then compares and contrasts at length Thevenot 9/6 edited with Thevenot 9/26.]

….

[Schneie:] I'm a bit baffled by this. It's one thing to correct your own story, but the earlier one appears to have been pulled, without a retraction or correction ever being issued. Instead, the reporter who wrote it seems to be attacking bad reporting -- and completely failing to point out that his own story played a key role.

The Pulitzer Prize for Deception?

In the best-case scenario, Brian Thevenot won two Pulitzer Prizes for a story he co-wrote, which discredited and at the same covered up a story he had previously botched. In the worst-case scenario, Thevenot and Gordon Russell shared two Pulitzer Prize for a story that was fraudulent in and of itself, and that charged Thevenot’s previous story with being either a botch, in which he was made a fool of by liars, or a pack of his own lies.

In either case – cover-up or outright fraud – Thevenot won a Pulitzer for dishonest reporting.

For a political analogy to Thevenot’s treatment, imagine Richard Nixon’s Watergate cover-up being exposed, but instead of Nixon being forced from office, Congress and the New York City Board of Estimate (which ran things in New York in those days) voting to give Nixon a tickertape parade down Manhattan’s Canyon of Heroes.

But things are even more crooked than they so far seem. For in place of the National Guardsmen’s 9/6 report of having seen with their own eyes 30-40 corpses warehoused in the convention center freezer, or denouncing the Guardsmen as liars, Thevenot and his 9/26 colleagues cooked up a new story entirely:

One widely circulated tale, told to The Times-Picayune by a slew of evacuees and two Arkansas National Guardsmen, held that “30 or 40 bodies” were stored in a Convention Center freezer. But a formal Arkansas Guard review of the matter later found that no soldier had actually seen the corpses, and that the information came from rumors in the food line for military, police and rescue workers in front of Harrah's New Orleans Casino, said [Lt. Col. John] Edwards, who conducted the review.

Note that the two anonymous National Guardsmen, who on 9/26 are given a new story, were identified on 9/6 as Mikel Brooks and Phillip Thompson. But on September 6, Thevenot had also mentioned “several other Guardsmen,” none of whom he named.

Rumors of Violence

Note that 9/26 used “rumor” in the sense of a lie spread by someone who claims that an unnamed person he knows, or an unnamed person who knows someone he knows, witnessed or experienced something dramatic. But as we shall see, the New Orleans “rumors” of horrific violence were based on the testimony of people who claimed to have directly witnessed or endured violent crimes, most of whom gave their names. Said witnesses are either telling the truth or lying, but they are most certainly not spreading “rumors.”

The 9/26 story was so dishonest in its attempts to discount the violence that not only had been reported by journalists from other news outlets, but which had been reported in many different stories by different reporters appearing on different days in the pages of the Times-Picayune, that I believe that 9/6 was the true story. (In any event, 9/26 is surely a fraud.) The Times-Picayune reporters who reported on the savagery included Susan Langenhennig, Susan Finch, James Varney, and of course, Brian Thevenot.

For Brian Thevenot, Gordon Russell, Jeff Duncan and Gwen Filosa to have a chance at winning over a reader who has read both 9/6 and 9/26, they would have to have condemned National Guardsmen Mikel Brooks and Phillip Thompson as liars for their 9/6 claims. Not only did the reporters not do that, but in different parts of the same story (9/26), they impeach Brooks’ credibility without naming him, and quote him by name as a witness (see next section)!

Disappearing Crime, Times-Picayune Style

Through a series of quotes from officials, 9/26 sets up the reader to believe that only four people – as opposed to the 34-44 reported on 9/6 – died, whether of natural or unnatural causes, at the Convention Center. The 9/26 team then seeks to shave that number down to only one “suspected” victim of violence.

Just one of the dead appeared to be the victim of foul play, said [NOPD Capt. Jeff] Winn, one of few law enforcement officers who spent any time patrolling the Convention Center before it was secured. Winn, who did the final sweep of the building, said one body appeared to have stab wounds, but he could not be sure. Baldwin also said only one of the dead appeared to have been slain, apparently referring to the same body as Winn described. Bob Johannessen, spokesman for the Department of Health and Hospitals, also confirmed just one suspected homicide at the Convention Center, though he said the victim had been shot, not stabbed.

A Washington Post report quoted another soldier who concluded that three of the four people appeared to have been beaten to death, including an older woman in a wheelchair.

But Spc. Mikel Brooks [!], an Arkansas Guardsman who said he wheeled the woman's dead body into the food service entrance, said she appeared to have died of natural causes. Brooks went on to say that the woman had expired sitting next to her husband, who shocked him by asking him to bring the wheelchair back.

The “Non-Crime” and “Exaggeration” Strategies

The September 26 team also “disappeared” crime via two other major tactics: Re-defining violent crimes as non-crimes, and through quotes from officials, claiming that the level of violence was greatly “exaggerated.”

“A National Guard military policeman was shot in the leg as the two scuffled for the MP's rifle, police Capt. Ernie Demmo said. The man was arrested.

“These are good people. These are just scared people,” Demmo said.

Capt. Demmo’s bizarre rationalization notwithstanding, other initial reports said that the military policeman was accompanied by a female comrade, and that when a man appeared in the dark, and hit each of them over the head with a metal rod, the female comrade, rather than defend her partner, ran away.

Later, the media, which had since “forgotten” the assaulted and cowardly female “soldier,” identified the assaulted military policeman as Louisiana National Guardsman Chris Watt, of the 527th Engineer Battalion. (Just as racial taboos forbid honest descriptions of black people behaving badly, sexual taboos forbid honest reporting on women who, while working in sexually inappropriate jobs – as police officers, military combat positions, “fire fighters,” etc. – prove themselves physically incompetent or show cowardice under fire.)

In 9/26, citing Watt’s commander, Thevenot, Russell, Duncan and Filosa told readers that the Guardsman’s wound was “self-inflicted,” because it came from his own rifle.

But that’s legally (not to mention, morally) irrelevant. If someone assaults a police officer, and the officer draws his weapon to defend himself, and during the struggle, his weapon fires and wounds him, the wound does not count as “self-inflicted,” because it was not accidental or the result of his intention, but rather the direct result of the assault.

Legally, the same would apply to the case of a National Guardsman keeping order. Thus, assuming the officer (soldier) survives, his attacker will be charged with first degree assault, assault with a deadly weapon, or attempted murder on a police officer (in Watt’s case, simply attempted murder). Thus, to attempt to turn the near murder of a National Guardsman into a “self-inflicted” wound is a case of sophistry in the service of evil. It also tells you what the Duranty-Blair winners think of the Guardsmen who risked their lives to save others during the savagery.

“Soldier shot - by himself

“Inside the Dome, where National Guardsmen performed rigorous security checks before allowing anyone inside, only one shooting has been verified. Even that incident, in which Louisiana Guardsman Chris Watt of the 527th Engineer Battalion was injured, has been widely misreported, said Maj. David Baldwin, who led the team of soldiers who arrested a suspect.

“Watt was attacked inside one of the Dome's locker rooms, which he entered with another soldier. In the darkness, as he walked through about six inches of water, Watt was attacked with a metal rod, a piece of a cot. But the bullet that penetrated Watt's leg came from his own gun - he accidentally shot himself in the commotion. The attacker never took his gun from him, Baldwin said. New Orleans police investigated the matter fully and sent the suspect to jail in Breaux Bridge, Baldwin said.

By the way, outside of science fiction and horror movies, “metal rods” do not attack people; only people and animals attack people. Talk about newspeak!

One year after Katrina, the Times-Picayune has been publishing its own propagandistic retrospectives, which apparently seek to bury the reader in so much revisionistic disinformation, that he never finds his way back to the truth.

In an August 30, 2006 revision by 9/26 team member, Jeff Duncan, the assault with the metal rod and the cowardly female comrade have both been sent down the memory hole, and all that is left is a “scuffle” Guardsman Watt had with an assailant, who though arrested, has never been named. One wonders what the civilian could have been charged with: Third-degree scuffling? Being a material witness to a self-inflicted wound?

If one would do violence to the English language, one must be consistent. Thus, if one would define out of existence a violent crime, one must also define out of existence the ensuing arrest for said crime.

At least we no longer have to worry about violent, lone metal rods on the prowl.

Maj. Baldwin notwithstanding, we also know of numerous cases in which people in the Superdome fired on rescue helicopters.

At the time of the attack on Guardsman Watt and his female comrade, some of their comrades in the 527th complained to Army Times reporter Joseph R. Chenelly.

An incensed Spc. Philip Baccus said, “I never thought that at [sic] a National Guardsman I would be shot at by other Americans. And I never thought I’d have to carry a rifle when on a hurricane relief mission. This is a disgrace.”

“Spc. Cliff Ferguson … pointed out that he knows there are plenty of decent people in New Orleans, but he said it is hard to stay motivated considering the circumstances.

“This is making a lot of us think about not reenlisting. You have to think about whether it is worth risking your neck for someone who will turn around and shoot at you. We didn’t come here to fight a war. We came here to help.”

And that was before they found out that the crimes against their comrades had been re-defined out of existence.

“Exaggeration”

Another key to disappearing the crime committed during the chaos has been to claim that initial reports were wildly “exaggerated.”

The 9/26 team quoted then-Deputy Police Superintendent Warren Riley as saying, “Everything was embellished, everything was exaggerated. If one guy said he saw six bodies, then another guy the same six, and another guy saw them - then that became 18.”

(Following Superintendent Eddie Compass’ forced resignation, Riley was named interim superintendent, and appointed superintendent outright on November 24.)

The initial targets of the “exaggeration” criticism – spread by Mayor Ray Nagin and Police Superintendent Eddie Compass, among others – were the claims of small children having been raped and murdered in the convention center, and of there being as many as 10,000 dead. The conventional wisdom has gone from assuming the truth to assuming the falsity of said claims. In the interest of protecting my ankles, I’ll skip jumping on this particular bandwagon, thank you very much.

However, 9/26 went way beyond casting doubt on the aforementioned “exaggerations,” and insinuated that there had not been remarkable violence in Katrina’s wake. Well, there was no violence worth remarking on in predominantly white towns like Gulfport, MS, but the reports of savagery in New Orleans were largely true.

The reason I say that, is that all a news team would have had to do to show the nation mind-numbing savagery, would have been to honestly report to the nation from the Big Easy in any given week prior to Katrina.

Before the Deluge

On August 21, 2005 – eight days before Katrina made landfall in New Orleans – the Associated Press’Alan Sayre reported on a study of crime in New Orleans. In “Murder on the rise in ill-equipped Big Easy: Homicide rate in New Orleans is 10 times national average,” Sayre reported on Crescent City residents already so inured to gunfire, that “university researchers conducted an experiment in which police fired 700 blank rounds in a New Orleans neighborhood in a single afternoon. No one called to report the gunfire.”

The same story ran the following day in the Detroit Free Press under the title, “CITIES AND CRIME: New Orleans homicides up as people fear killers, cops.”

“‘We're going in the reverse of 46 of the top 50 cities in the United States. Almost everyone is going down, but we're going up,’ said criminologist Peter Scharf. ‘There is something going on in New Orleans that is not going on elsewhere.’”

And yet, at its peak in 1994 (421 murders), the city’s murder rate had been 58.9 higher than its pre-Katrina (265) number in 2004.

As Nicole Gelinas reported last fall, New Orleans’ murder rate doubled in the wake of Katrina. That would make it, say, 19 times the national rate, although that would “merely” have made it perhaps 25 percent higher than the city’s 1994 number. In other words, even if we ignore the most controversial claims of raped, murdered little children and 10,000 dead, given New Orleans’ history, the savagery initially reported in Katrina’s wake, appears to be a case of a city returning to a level of violence that it had previously known.

But the pre-storm murder rate Sayre and Gelinas cited was based on New Orleans’ pre-Katrina population of 480,000. And yet, the highest estimate for its population in the days after the storm hit was only 150,000, or 68.8 percent below its normal population. That means that the post-Katrina murder rate, even given the lowball figures that were released, was almost 60 times the national rate.

But it gets still worse. Reports at the time claimed that the people who remained in the city to face the brunt of Katrina were overwhelmingly women and children and the old and the ill.

And so, even the low-balled figures were high for New Orleans.

New Orleans is a city that has long been so corrupt, that during the mid-1990s, a number of black murderers were at home in the NOPD. Two of those murderers, Antoinette Frank and Len Davis, are currently sitting on Death Row for crimes they committed white they were New Orleans police officers.

Frank, already a notorious sociopath whose deranged behavior had not succeeded at keeping her off the NOPD, murdered and robbed a white, off-duty NOPD officer (Ronald Williams, who ran security for the restaurant and who sometimes, grudgingly, used Frank as fill-in), and murdered the Vietnamese owner’s son and daughter (Cuong Vu and Ha Vu) at the restaurant where Frank occasionally worked off-duty as a security guard. Frank had decided to rob the place, and rob and murder all of the employees, but two employees hid in a walk-in refrigerator; Frank was caught when she returned to the scene of the crime to finish off the two witnesses.

Len Davis was a crime kingpin while on duty. Although NOPD officials knew that Davis was a violent criminal when he applied to the force, as part of their affirmative action program, they not only hired him, but deleted his criminal record from the NOPD mainframe.

Davis had ordered a drug dealer associate, Paul “Cool” Hardy to murder Kim Groves, after she had complained about the brutal, unprovoked beating that Davis’ partner, Sammie Williams, had administered to her nephew.

The reason that the NOPD was hiring sociopaths, was that they were black sociopaths. There was tremendous pressure from black New Orleanians to hire as few whites and as many blacks as possible – by any means necessary. Thus were intellectual and moral standards eliminated, and a residency requirement introduced that was only temporarily suspended – in spite of much black opposition – in the wake of Katrina.

Thus although in the wake of the Antoinette Frank and Len Davis cases, the NOPD introduced some mild reforms, it should surprise no one that in Katrina’s wake, so many NOPD officers were guilty of desertion and looting.

In Alan Sayre’s aforementioned AP report, Sayre recounted figures that had as a consequence that in less than 14 percent of the city’s murder cases, was anyone being convicted. That means that following Katrina, murderers were roaming the streets at will.

It's a Crime

As for the reality of black crime, during the 1960s, black activists, black and white journalists, and black and white academics, charged that the police were an “occupying army” in black neighborhoods that routinely engaged in “police brutality.” In other words, the good guys were now the “criminals,” and the criminals were now the “good guys.”

The aforementioned groups did everything possible to support violent black predators, including helping cop-killers like Black Panther leader Huey Newton to get acquitted of the murder of white Oakland PD Officer John Frey, to defaming as racists heroic white cops who risked their lives protecting black citizens.

The same campaign promoted the normalization of black illegitimacy, which is the surest guarantee of black crime. In 1965, when Johnson administration adviser, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of America’s leading social scientists, wrote the report, The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, warning of its subject’s impending collapse, black activists and academics screamed bloody murder, effectively sending Moynihan, the domestic observer, into early retirement.

[Note that the Department of Labor has disabled all links to the report’s introduction and table of contents, and to each chapter; and the cache of the introduction, which is how I originally accessed each chapter earlier this summer, has also expired. Why is the government censoring a famous, 41-year-old report? However, I downloaded the report last summer, and since it was a government report funded by the taxpayer, it is therefore the people’s property, and cannot be copyrighted. Hence I cannot sued for republishing it, which I shall do at the earliest possible opportunity.]

Thereafter, Moynihan stopped doing bold research on domestic, and especially welfare policy. In particular, then-Sen. Moynihan opposed the 1996 welfare reform bill that was grudgingly signed into law by Pres. Clinton as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, more commonly known as the Personal Responsibility Act. I submit that Moynihan may have suffered from a racial form of Stockholm Syndrome.

At the time of the Moynihan Report, as it came to be known, the black illegitimacy rate was 21.7 percent. By 1970 (see Table 10), the black rate had risen to 37.5 percent, versus 5.5 percent for whites; in 1975, the relation was 49.5 percent versus 7.1 percent; and in 1980, it was 56.1 percent vs. 11.2 percent. The black illegitimacy rate peaked in 1998 at 69.1 percent vs. 26.3 for whites. By 2003, the black rate had flattened out at 68.2 percent, while the white rate continued to rise, hitting 29.4 percent.

Black crime exploded in complementary fashion.

The other race hoax blacks and their white allies pursued was, contradictorily, to variously rationalize the explosion in black crime that began circa 1964, and to simultaneously deny that it had occurred, by insisting that white police officers were rounding up and arresting, brutalizing, and murdering innocent black males. Circa 1999, the slogan “racial profiling” was coined, in support of what Arch Puddington that same year called, “The War on the War on Crime.”

As affirmative action gave way to “diversity,” which required not only hiring unqualified people and discriminating against qualified people, based on their respective race or ethnicity, but misrepresenting reality, to make blacks and Hispanics (and now, Arab Moslems) look good (or victimized) and whites to look bad, in addition to routinely engaging in racial and ethnic discrimination, journalism schools began demanding an implicit political loyalty oath from applicants and students to report dishonestly. And once “J-school” graduates were hired by media outlets, they encountered racist black and Hispanic newsroom enforcers, to ensure that they didn’t accidentally tell the truth.

Another practice in reporting on crime that took hold following “Jesse Jackson’s” 1989 syndicated column (the scare quotes are because, like other politicians of all races, Jackson doesn’t write his own material) on “black-on-black crime” was echoing the lie, according to which blacks comprised the majority of the victims of black criminals. Already prior to “Jackson’s” column, students of crime knew that although there were five-and-one half times as many whites as blacks, black criminals victimized whites more often than they did blacks. This was the real racial profiling story that no one in the MSM would report on.

However, the practice arose, whereby reporters and columnists were permitted to compassionately focus on black (but not on white, heterosexual male) crime victims, as long as they did not focus on black criminals, unless it was to somehow depict the criminals themselves as victims.

I believe that MSM reporters were attempting to follow the “black crime victims” rule early during the deluge. However, they ran into the current version of the 40-year-old, once radical but since mainstreamed black practice of “not taking yes for an answer.” That means that the more whites suck up to blacks, the angrier blacks get. (Of course, the more one refuses to suck up to blacks, the angrier they get!)

One problem the MSM reporters encountered in New Orleans was in depicting black crime victims. Apparently, it is now unacceptable to blacks to even show black crime victims, if that involves reporting on black criminals. Apparently, the only currently (i.e., as of 2:28 a.m., September 10, 2006) unobjectionable way to portray black crime victims is, as Spike Lee does, in his fictional “documentary,” When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, as the victims of white criminals.

MSM reporters were also taken to task by outraged blacks, for compassionately referring to the New Orleans refugees as, “refugees.”

Although by the early 1990s, the media practice of disappearing black crime (e.g., by editors refusing to identify black attackers, even when they were still at large and not identifying them endangered the public, and by producers depicting criminals in commercials and dramatic shows alike as white) was taking hold, activists, journalists, academics and ordinary black citizens alike made ever louder, counterfactual complaints that blacks were being demonized by the news and entertainment media, by being “stereotyped” as criminals.

I don’t know whether blacks’ complaints were rhetorical strategies or the sincere expression of race mania.

In his 1993 book, The Rage of a Privileged Class: Why are Middle-Class Blacks Angry? Why Should America Care?, black journalist Ellis Cose went so far as to claim that blacks only commit violent crimes because the media depict them as criminals, causing them to become criminals. Cose’s theory is logically circular, causally backwards (since it was pervasive black crime that came before the pre-diversity reporting on it), and presupposes that blacks lack freedom of will. Note too that, contra Cose, blacks had much higher crime rates than whites in the pre-TV era.

Diversity politics protected Cose from facing any of the above criticisms from his MSM colleagues, and any non-MSM writer, such as yours truly who makes them, is either ignored or damned by the pc as a “racist.”

In 2004, Fred Reed observed that one cannot have a “diverse” newsroom and honest journalism, because any instance honest journalism is bound to offend a member of a protected group (blacks, females, gays), that will then exercise a veto right to have the offending truth censored.

Today, it is no longer simply activists or affirmative action newsroom enforcers who impose the diversity line, but blacks from all walks of life. I can’t recall the last time I encountered a black who was honest about black crime, and who would not race-bait a white who was. On August 26, VDARE.com published a typical, outrage-filled letter from an older, Christian, black Harvard graduate, complaining of the demonization of blacks.

Just as affirmative action leads inexorably to apartheid and to Zimbabwe-style violence, it also leads inexorably to the promotion of fictional, parallel universes in journalism, academia, and among protected minority groups in general.

A National Sensation – in Reverse

The September 26 story caused a new, reverse national sensation.

Nowhere in the 3,383-word story, did the reporters admit that the “widely circulated tale” came from their own colleague, Brian Thevenot (or that 9/6 had been a Times-Picayune story at all), or that Thevenot had written that the National Guard troops he had interviewed in the Convention Center had said they had seen the dozens of corpses of whom they had spoken. Indeed, had anyone spoken of merely having “heard of” mountains of corpses, the story would not have had the power to shock. Either Thevenot was lying, or the Guardsmen were.

Since the Times-Picayune reporters refused to admit that their newspaper had circulated the original story, they were guilty of dishonesty in any event.

Last October 3, blogger Eric Scheie had reported that Thevenot responded to his e-mail asking him to explain the conflicts between his 9/6 and 9/26 stories, by insisting that he had publicly retracted his September 6 story. However, at the time, neither Schneie nor I could find any such public retraction. As far either of us could determine, Brian Thevenot had lied about having made the retraction.

Brian Thevenot did not respond to an October 11, 2005 e-mail from this writer asking him the same question as Scheie.

I corrected the freezer report – along with a slew of other rumors and myths transmitted by the media – in a September 26 Times-Picayune story coauthored by my colleague Gordon Russell. In that piece, we sought to separate fact from fiction on the narrow issue of reported violence at the Louisiana Superdome and the Convention Center.

Wrong! He never corrected the freezer report. A correction involves a newspaper explicitly saying that a report it had previously published was mistaken, and correcting the mistake. Thevenot et al., and their editors never admitted to having botched 9/6; rather they transferred the blame to faceless, nameless “rumors.” What percentage of civilian (i.e., non-journalist and non-academic) readers are likely to have read 9/6, 9/26, and the December/January AJR story? One? Two?

And on 9/26, Thevenot et al. (he forgot to give credit to Jeff Duncan and Gwen Filosa) did not restrict themselves to the “narrow issue of reported violence at the Louisiana Superdome and the Convention Center.” Rather, they sought to discredit in the broadest sense imaginable, reports of violence in all of New Orleans, in Katrina’s wake. But then, even their 9/26 statements about the Superdome and convention center failed to hold water.

* * *

The mainstream national media immediately began slavishly promoting 9/26, just as they had slavishly promoted 9/6. Socialists, libertarians, and neo-conservatives, albeit for different reasons (e.g., ideology, expediency), also found the story useful. (See also here.

Thevenot, who is white, was rewarded for 9/26 not only with a Pulitzer, but with the 2006 “Award for Valor Courageous Humanitarian Deeds,” from NAMME, the National Association of Minority Media Executives, a group of affirmative action functionaries, at NAMME’s April 27 “Celebration of Diversity” Awards banquet.

It was with great relief that the media latched on to 9/26. In spite of the article’s transparently dishonest character to anyone who had followed the New Orleans story, to my knowledge, not a single Big Media outlet published work contradicting 9/26. (Far from merely spreading “rumors,” in the days immediately following Katrina’s landfall, dozens of media outlets published or broadcast eyewitness accounts of horrendous violence, in which sometimes the reporter himself was the eyewitness. In many other cases, the eyewitnesses gave their names.)

In “Who’s Killing New Orleans?,” in the Autumn 2005 issue of City Journal, Nicole Gelinas provided, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive refutation of 9/26. (While Gelinas is a columnist for the Big Media, neocon New York Post, to my knowledge the Post went along with 9/26. Kudos to City Journal editor Myron Magnet for having the cojones to publish Gelinas’ expose.)

The New York Times’s own Dan Barry, a longtime metro columnist with no history of lying, hallucinating, or repeating tall tales, witnessed the corpse of a murder victim that had been lying out for days smack in the middle of New Orleans’s central business district. “A Louisiana state trooper around the corner knew all about it: murder victim, bludgeoned, one of several in that area,” Barry wrote on September 8.

Gelinas also cited and quoted from stories from the Associated Press, New York Times, Weekly Standard, and, again and again, the Times-Picayune itself (August 30 and 31, and September 1, 7, and 8).

The stories detailed corpses seen by reporters in the streets of New Orleans from shootings and bludgeonings; people shot dead by police officers (as retold by the Weekly Standard’sMatt Labash); one policeman who survived being shot in the head by a looter; a gang rape witnessed by Jake Staples, an official of the National D-Day Museum; of gunmen who randomly shot at displaced families (including Brenda Austin and her family) trudging across town; the experiences of Vinnie Pervel, as reported by Susan Langenhennig in the September 7 Times-Picayune, who was assaulted with a sledgehammer and carjacked one day, and who watched as two neighbors shot two looters the next afternoon; and of civilians (e.g., Antoinette K-Doe) and police alike facing or hearing constant gunfire.

With the exception of 9/26, constant gunfire echoes through the New Orleans stories.

Firing on Rescuers

Thevenot, Russell, Duncan and Filosa have claimed that the widely reported stories of shots being fired at rescue workers, which held up rescue efforts, were also based on mere rumors. However, their own colleague, Susan Finch, reported on September 7 that 21-year-old Wendell L. Bailey was arrested and charged with “shooting at a relief helicopter from an apartment window.”

In “New Orleans Slides into Chaos; US Scrambles to Send Troops,” in the September 2 Los Angeles Times, reporters Ellen Barry, Scott Gold and Stephen Braun quoted first-responders Dr. Charles Burnell and paramedic Toby Bergeron, as having said “several gunshots were fired at helicopters - military and commercial - during the 24 hours they spent treating refugees at the Superdome.”

Dr. Burnell reported on his observations in a September 4 interview with Fox News host, Greta Van Susteren, as well.

The Los Angeles Times also reported, “Stray gunshots and threats from evacuees led some rescuers to suspend boat searches along New Orleans’ swollen waterways. ‘In areas where our employees have been determined to potentially be in danger, we have pulled back,’ confirmed Russ Knocke, Department of Homeland Security spokesman.”

In another widely reported incident, on Sunday, September 4, eight snipers attempted to murder 14 contractors, who were seeking to help repair the levee, as the latter “were crossing the Danziger Bridge, which spans a canal connecting Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River,” in seeking to repair a breach in the 17th Street Canal. According to then-Deputy Police Superintendent Warren Riley, NOPD officers returned fire, killing five or six of the snipers. The snipers were unimpressed with the contractors’ police escort, until the police shot them dead.

“Hospitals are trying to evacuate,” said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesan, spokesman at the city emergency operations center. “At every one of them, there are reports that as the helicopters come in people are shooting at them. There are people just taking potshots at police and at helicopters, telling them, ‘You better come get my family.’”

In the above case, “reports” referred to information from the rescue workers to their superiors. (Holbrook Mohr, Mary Foster, Robert Tanner, Allen G. Breed, Cain Burdeau, Jay Reeves and Brett Martel also contributed to Nossiter’s report.)

In contrast, the 9/26 team would have us believe that none of the aforementioned incidents happened. As Riley himself, since promoted to police chief, following the forced resignation of NOPD Superintendent Eddie Compass, would claim to the 9/26 team,

“Everything was embellished, everything was exaggerated. If one guy said he saw six bodies, then another guy the same six, and another guy saw them - then that became 18.”

The 9/26 team also asserted that reports of attacks on rescue workers were the unfounded products of “rumors.”

The [initial] picture that emerged was one of the impoverished, masses of flood victims resorting to utter depravity, randomly attacking each other, as well as the police trying to protect them and the rescue workers trying to save them.

Note that in the first days after Katrina hit, the Times-Picayune savaged President Bush, whom it blamed for the violence that the staunch Democrat newspaper on 9/26 would say had never happened. Police Superintendent Eddie Compass likewise was forced to resign based on the same, imaginary anarchy. If 9/26 is true, why has the Times-Picayune not apologized to President Bush, and demanded that Superintendent Compass be reinstated?

(N.B. Readers familiar with any of my many criticisms of President Bush know that I am no “Bushbot.” However, I also do not stupidly blame the man for things that are not his fault.)

The 9/26 story was also supported by the NOPD’s chief flack, Capt. Marlon Defillo, who said, apparently without breaking down in hysterical fits of laughter, “The vast majority of people [looting] were taking food and water to live. There were no killings, not one murder.’ As for sniper fire: No bullet holes were found in the fuselage of any rescue helicopter.” [So, what?! That doesn’t mean they weren’t fired on.]

Republican media critic Noel Sheppard cited Capt. Defillo approvingly, in a March 6 essay decrying “Katrina Myths,” in which Sheppard asserted, “In reality, although looting and other property crimes were widespread after the flooding on Monday, Aug. 29, almost none of the stories about violent crime turned out to be true.”

Sheppard was writing based on a Popular Mechanics article that had uncritically echoed the Times-Picayune cover-up. (I have for years studied the history of violence in America, and I am not aware of widespread looting ever occurring without being accompanied by widespread violence.)

No journalist worth his salt would trust the laughably discredited then-Capt. Marlon Defillo to give him the correct time of day.

Back in March, Defillo, now an assistant chief, made the wittingly comic claim that although NOPD officers were photographed looting in stores, since no civilians were photographed looting at the same time in the same stores, the officers’ conduct did not count as looting.

Don’t ask me to explain Defillo's logic, or lack thereof.

As I said at the time of Asst. Chief Defillo, remember that name!

As we shall later see, through the work of Nicole Gelinas, during the chaos, New Orleans suffered at least twice its pre-Katrina murder rate, a murder rate that was already five times the national average and the worst in the nation.

Considering the many eyewitness reports by first-responders, journalists on the scene, and officials of (black) snipers firing on the predominantly white folks who sought to help the people left behind – doctors, nurses, and medics; rescue workers in helicopters and boats; contractors seeking to repair the damage; and even National Guard troops – the Times-Picayune’s attempt to rewrite history is obscene. One recalls the comedy routine by the late Richard Pryor, who when his wife had caught him in bed with another woman, shouted, “Who are you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?!”

Even from the beginning, when the media were still reporting honestly on the mayhem gripping The Big Easy, police officials sought to rationalize the madness of snipers shooting at people who were already risking their lives seeking to rescue people trapped by the flooding. We were told that the snipers were “frightened,” “scared,” and were trying to “get [rescuers’] attention.” Well, they certainly succeeded.

As I wrote last October 10, the snipers weren’t “frightened” or “scared”; they likely felt a mix of racist rage and joy. It was the rescuers who were frightened out of their wits!

Unless one is a law enforcement officer or a fighting man hunting down bad guys or the enemy, only a suicidal person would respond to being fired at, by deliberately heading toward the person shooting at him. Otherwise, the sane response is to get as far away from the gunfire, as fast as possible.

I have a much simpler explanation why snipers were firing at rescue workers: The former were trying to murder the latter.

Picture the scene. Heavily armed, ultraviolent, racist black thugs (who in many cases had broken into gun shops and helped themselves to firearms and ammunition), who considered themselves in a situation of total license, and who had stationed themselves on roofs or in the upper-story, high-rise and house windows, saw unarmed, vulnerable, predominantly white rescue workers and contractors in helicopters, boats, or just standing in the wide open on bridges and levees.

One crime victim who later spoke to NPR’sJohn Burnett, summed up the situation more accurately than the 9/26 team.

Days of Lawlessness

Anastasia is a petite, 25-year-old hairdresser who asked that her last name be omitted. She contacted the New Orleans police in October and filed a report that she was beaten with a bat and raped on Sept. 6th in broad daylight next to a flooded McDonald's at Gentilly Boulevard and Elysian Fields, near her father's house.

Anastasia says thugs were still wandering the streets of her neighborhood more than a week after the flood. “I didn't see any police officers -- I could have gotten away with murder,” she says. “It was that terrible. So I can assume what the criminals were thinking, and that's exactly what happened.”

The coroner’s early report implies that the murder rate among those stranded in Katrina’s aftermath was at least five times New Orleans’s normal murder rate [i.e., fifty times the national rate]. This real, not imagined, violence prevented New Orleans from getting the level of volunteer and professional help it needed after Katrina.

As Gelinas emphasized, in speaking of a “culture of murder,” savage levels of violence, unimaginable to most Americans, were already the rule in “NOLA” before Katrina ever made landfall.

But the grisly truth is that awful violence in New Orleans is never an aberration—whether before or after Katrina. Just consider the following snippets from the Times-Picayune, all printed in the month before Katrina hit. They seem just as hysterical as some of Katrina’s wildest tales.

“Violence tests the limits of mortician’s art.” “Some neighborhoods are being terrorized by thugs who have figured out that they have little to fear from the justice system.” “Almost nightly images of violent crime bludgeon New Orleans.” “Violent crime has emerged as . . . an ongoing source of national embarrassment.” “Murders are so common we have become numbed to their sting.” “Killers are killed, Orleans police say.” “The city is becoming scarier.” “Violence shows no signs of letup.” “Three men killed in seven hours; all are shot to death on New Orleans streets.” “After a short reprieve from murder and mayhem in New Orleans on Friday, six men lost their lives.” “This is Iraq right here in New Orleans. By 2020 there might not be any black people left.” “There’s a different type of murder occurring now and a different type of criminal out there.” “New Orleans area continues to log murder after murder.” “Something must be done to curb the violence festering in New Orleans.” “Now we’re in a bloody war nobody’s safe from.” Day in and day out, Katrina or no Katrina, New Orleans is America’s most dangerous city. But the numbers don’t tell the whole story. White and black residents, rich and poor, of good neighborhoods and bad, are afraid to go out at night beyond the clear boundaries of well-patrolled areas like the heart of the French Quarter—and night means 6:00 pm, not 2:00 am. Everyone in New Orleans knows someone who has been violently mugged—and everyone knows someone who knows someone who has been violently killed.

In the weeks following 9/26, ever more outraged New Orleans crime victims and witnesses came forward from all over the country, to denounce the published crime numbers, as did first-responders who had treated some victims in the Superdome, but who were forced to flee after only 24 hours. By mid-December, even NOPD officials, such as Lt. Dave Benelli, commander of the NOPD sex crimes unit, were forced to back down from the phony crime numbers (e.g., only four rapes!) they had brazenly peddled following the anarchy, as dozens of since displaced women reported from around the country having been raped in New Orleans and environs in the days immediately following Katrina. The Times-Picayune, however, was umoved by these first-person reports.

To see the incredible character of the cover-up, read Nicole Gelinas’ story, hit the links I have provided throughout this article, and stroll through the Times-Picayune blog of stories from the middle of the chaos. One will then surely recall the TV spot reporting of the violence as it unfolded.

Any time I revisit that blog, I come across stories I hadn’t seen before that give the lie to 9/26.

Across the city Thursday, the haunting fear of flooding was replaced by a raw fear for life and public safety.

Navigating the St. Thomas area of the Lower Garden District in an SUV, Times-Picayune reporter [and 9/26 co-author!] Gordon Russell, accompanied by a photographer from The New York Times, described a landscape of lawlessness where he feared for his life and felt his safety was threatened at nearly every turn.

At the Superdome and Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, Russell said throngs of hungry and desperate people displaced by the flood overwhelmed the few law enforcement or miliatary personnel present.

“There was no crowd control,” Russell said. “People were swarming.It was a near riot situation. The authorities have got to get some military down here to get control of the situation.”

Russell witnessed a shootout between police and citizens near the Convention Center that left one man dead in a pool of blood. Police, perhaps caught off guard by their sudden arrival on the scene, slammed Russell and the photographer against a wall and threw their gear on the ground as they exited their SUV to record the event.

The journalists retreated to Russell's home Uptown where they hid in fear. They planned to flee the city later today.

Almost everywhere Russell went Uptown, one of the few relatively dry areas in Orleans Parish, he said he felt the threat of violence.

"There is a totally different feeling here than there was yesterday (Wednesday)," said Russell, who has reported on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina since the storm devastated the city on Monday. "I'm scared. I'm not afraid to admit it. I'm getting out of here."

Yet another blow to the MSM’s (following the Times-Picayune) revised, official Katrina story came on November 14, when reports on New Orleans’ dead were published by the State of Louisiana. The mainstream media had promoted the notion that those who suffered in the Hurricane’s aftermath were almost exclusively black. After all, over 90 percent of those stuck in the city were reportedly black, with the blacks predominantly stuck in the Ninth Ward and environs, where the levees had been breached. And the whites who remained reportedly lived above sea level on dry land (including Uptown), in the city’s tonier precincts. One was given to expect that the dead would be virtually all black. But in fact,

Of the 562 bodies (out of 883) that had so far been identified by race, 48 percent (267) were “African American,” 41 percent (230) were “Caucasian,” eight percent (48) were “unknown,” 2 percent (13) were “Hispanic,” 1 percent (3) were “Native American,” and zero percent (1) was “other.”

Few of those “privileged” white folks, Uptown and in similar dry areas, were the victims of Katrina. As were many of the black dead, most of the white dead were likely the victims of foul play. But as Steve Sailer had predicted already on September 6, 2005 (Day 9), officials would eventually downplay the savagery, lowballing the victim count, and medical examiners would have little interest in examining bloated, waterlogged corpses for bullet or blunt trauma wounds. And citing a letter from a reader, whose doctor father had been fired on by snipers during Detroit’s massive, 1967 black race riot, Sailer noted the tradition of firing on rescue workers during race riots.

As Nicole Gelinas argued last year, if we refuse to tell the truth about New Orleans, and to eliminate its “culture of murder,” every dollar spent on rebuilding the city will have been wasted.

The Times-Picayune’s 9/26 Pulitzer juggernaut could have been stopped dead in its tracks. After all, the hardy bloggers I previously cited, Ziel and Eric Scheie, had immediately discredited the 9/26 story. But journalism, whether on the Internet or among so-called professional journalists, is largely pack journalism, effective as a public watchdog only to the degree that large numbers of scribes hunt down, and over an extended period tear apart a person or a story. But with the exception of certain issues, such as immigration reform, that transcend party lines (or are ignored by both major parties’ leadership), what Max Weber observed some 90 years ago is still true: Most journalistic issues, including among bloggers, are determined by the interests of the major parties. And the major parties do not want honest reporting on racial issues, and only a statistically negligible number of bloggers have the cojones to stand up to them.

To appreciate the horrible consequences of 9/26, not only did the media jump on the disinformation bandwagon, but ever since, racist black propagandists have fed the lies like crabgrass, while cutting out the truth. Thus, over the past week or so, TV viewers have been treated to continuous showings of Spike Lee’s four-hour-long, HBO-subsidized propumentary, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.

Lee built on both the Times-Picayune’s disinformation campaign, and on the Big Lie perpetrated by the leader of the terrorist Nation of Islam, Min. Louis Farrakhan, according to which the flooding of black neighborhoods was part of a genocidal campaign by whites to murder black New Orleanians. Lee presents as true a surreally fictional story, in which the only violence committed in New Orleans in Katrina’s wake, was perpetrated by whites against blacks.

(Note that Min. Farrakhan leads an organization that not only is based on the creed that blacks will one day annihilate all whites, but which has actually engaged in the targeted mass murder of anywhere from dozens to hundreds of whites, most notably during a genocidal, early-to-mid 1970s campaign in across the state of California. That campaign, carried out by squads of assassins known within the NOI as “death angels,” cost anywhere from 70 to “just under 270” (Clark Howard) whites their lives. The 15 black-on-white murders carried out by NOI assassins in San Francisco, came to be known as the “Zebra Murders,” because the SFPD reserved radio frequency “Z,” for “Zebra,” for police broadcasts related to the killings.

Thus is Min. Farrakhan’s talk of genocide an exercise in pure projection.)

Photojournalist-fraud Adnan Hajj notwithstanding, journalists don’t need “photoshop” or any other new technology, in order to foist hoaxes on the world. Words alone will usually do just fine.

If, as the old saw holds, journalism is history’s first draft, history is in trouble.

In the world of comic books, Superman’s father, Jor-El, gave the former a piece of advice regarding the reversing of time that reporters would do well to follow: “It is forbidden for you to interfere in human history.”

About Me

I am a dissident journalist, whose work has been published in dozens of daily newspapers, magazines, and journals in English, German, and Swedish, under my own name and many pseudonyms. While living in internal exile in New York, where I am whitelisted, I maintain NSU/The Wyatt Earp Journalism Bureau and some eight other blogs (some are distinctive but occasional venues, while others are mirrors), and also write for stout-hearted men such as Peter Brimelow and Jared Taylor. Please hit the “Donate” button on your way out. Thanks, in advance.
Follow my tweets at @NicholasStix.

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